Girl’s short life full of turmoil before death

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5:25 pm CST, Friday, February 24, 2012

Photo: Jay Reeves

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Gail Denny places a candle and stuffed animal outside the home of 9-year-old Savannah Hardin near Attalla, Ala. Authorities say Hardin was forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her grandmother about eating candy bars. The severely dehydrated girl had a seizure and her death days later was ruled a homicide. less

Gail Denny places a candle and stuffed animal outside the home of 9-year-old Savannah Hardin near Attalla, Ala. Authorities say Hardin was forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her ... more

Photo: Jay Reeves

Girl’s short life full of turmoil before death

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ATTALLA, Ala. — Savannah Hardin’s life was in turmoil long before police say the 9-year-old was run to death by her grandmother and stepmother for allegedly lying about some candy she ate.

Divorce and custody documents filed in family court over a period of several years reflect a history of fractured family relationships, with Savannah’s divorced parents fighting over her welfare; claims of mental instability and abuse between her father and his second wife; medical problems that required frequent doctor visits; and counseling for the girl who still somehow managed to remain among the top students in her third-grade class.

Authorities say Savannah’s life ended in exhaustion earlier this month when she was forced by her paternal grandmother, Joyce Hardin Gerrard, to run for three hours, while her stepmother, Jessica Mae Hardin, did nothing to stop it.

The grandmother prodded her along cruelly, and the stepmother didn’t intervene until Savannah collapsed in an unconscious heap, investigators say.

Now, Hardin Garrard is in jail and Savannah’s stepmother is being held in police custody at a hospital after giving birth to another child. Both have been charged with murder.

Jessica Mae Hardin’s attorneys, Morgan Cunningham and Vince Pentecost, said in a statement Friday that Hardin was “incredibly devastated over Savannah’s death” and they would prove her innocence.

Romney would raise eligibility age for Medicare

DETROIT — Four days before critical primary elections, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney outlined a far-reaching plan Friday to gradually delay Americans’ eligibility for Medicare as well as Social Security.

Romney said the shift, as people live longer, is needed to steer the giant benefit programs toward economic sustainability.

Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club — in cavernous Ford Field, where the Detroit Lions football team plays — he also made a play for primary election support in Michigan, which votes on Tuesday along with Arizona.

Romney said previous steps to toughen government emission standards had “provided a benefit to some of the foreign automakers” at the expense of American companies. He said future changes should be worked out cooperatively between government and industry.

Campaigning in the city where he was born, Romney described himself as “a car guy” who has a Ford Mustang and a Chevy pickup and whose wife, Ann, drives “a couple of Cadillacs.” Aides said they were model year 2007 and 2010 SRX vehicles, one each registered in Massachusetts and California.

351-year-old will sparks bitter dispute in Mass.

BOSTON — With only eight days to live, a wealthy, ailing Massachusetts merchant wrote in his will 351 years ago that he was leaving a spectacular 35-acre seafront property for the benefit of public school children, decreeing the land should never be sold or wasted.

The dying wish of William Payne, one of the state’s earliest settlers, created the nation’s oldest charitable trust and eventually led tenants to build 167 cottages — most of them used by summer vacationers — on the land he left for the seaside city of Ipswich. The rent money has generated some $2.4 million to help fund public schools over the last 25 years.

Now, the trustees want to tear up the will, convert the property into condominiums and sell them to the tenants to settle a 2006 lawsuit filed by the tenants over rent increases. But hundreds of Ipswich residents have gone to court to block the settlement, saying it violates the sacred intent of Payne’s will and shortchanges the schools.

Shipwrecked silver begins voyage back to Spain

TAMPA, Florida — A 17-ton haul of silver coins, lost for two centuries in the wreck of a sunken Spanish galleon, began its journey back to its home country on Friday after the deep-sea explorers who lifted it to the surface lost their claim to ownership.

Two Spanish military C-130 cargo planes took off after noon from a Florida Air Force base with 594,000 silver coins and other artifacts aboard. They were packed into the same white plastic buckets in which they were brought to the U.S. by Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration in May 2007.

“These are emotional and moving moments for me and all my colleagues behind me,” Spain’s ambassador to the United States, Jorge Dezcallar de Mazar, said Friday. He stood on the windy tarmac at MacDill Air Force base, flanked by an entourage of more than two dozen Spanish officials and others.“History will make us who we are, and today we are witnessing a journey that started 200 years ago,” he said. “This is not money. This is historical heritage.”The planes were expected to make two refueling stops and land about 24 hours later at one of two air force bases in Madrid in a high-security operation.